[jdev] last presence confusion

[Justin Karneges]

On Monday 28 January 2008 1:06 pm, Tomasz Sterna wrote:
> On Pn, 2008-01-28 at 13:55 -0700, Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> > > Besides the coolness factor I see the usefulness factor:
> > > "Went to Aruba. Be back on 12.02."
> >
> > Oh yes, you can do that now with some clients (I know Psi does it). I
> > keep worrying that someone will post a 5k story about their wonderful
> > trip to Aruba ("OMG I just got back from Aruba and I had such an
> > awesome
> > time, here's the full trip report.....") and use that as their status
> > message while they sleep off the trip. ;-)
> >
> > But maybe I need to stop worrying so much...
>
> Is it really that different from setting this story + XA and leaving the
> client online?

I think this is an important point.

Many people enjoy having a status while being gone.  What is the difference 
between setting your status in Facebook to "gone fishing" (which persists 
even after the browser is closed) and setting your status in Jabber to "gone 
fishing" and wanting to close the client?  Is a status string associated with 
unavailable presence less interesting than a status string associated with XA 
presence?  Should the type of presence (unavailable vs XA) affect the 
efficiency in which it can be received?

Today I noticed a Gadu-Gadu transport that replies with presence for all of 
your GG contacts, whether offline or not.  So you get maximum efficiency in 
receiving offline presence.  I believe this feature was inspired by the fact 
that offline messages are quite popular in Poland.

Whether this feature becomes a "SHOULD" or stays a "MAY", we still have the 
problem that a client cannot rely on the feature being present nor can a 
client even determine if the feature is supported.  When should a client 
resort to jabber:iq:last?  I think we should come up with some best practices 
here, or possibly some protocol elements.

-Justin